Podia vs Teachable: Which Is The Clear Winner?

Podia Features

Podia includes everything you need to easily create and sell online courses. I want to touch on the features that are the most beneficial and compare them to what Teachable offers in the same category.

• Memberships
• Digital downloads
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing
• Coupons
• Getting paid
• Monthly/Annual cost

Teachable offers a lot of these same tools (and others), but I believe that Podia provides you with exactly what you need without a lot of other fluff. When you are trying to create and organize your course, the last thing you need is distractions that aren’t really necessary.

Memberships and Product Bundles

Memberships can help you earn predictable, recurring revenue by offering a monthly or yearly membership subscription to your audience. It’s also a great idea to create a free membership in order to create more leads.

Podia memberships include:

• Offer multiple plans
• Create members only content
• Podia is the only membership site software that lets you bundle any of your online courses or digital downloads with your membership.
• Interact with your members by inviting them to comment on your posts.

In online learning, a course bundle is a way of packaging or “bundling” multiple courses and selling them together at one price. Course bundles are usually discounted from the combined price of the individual courses as a way to encourage sales.

On Teachable, course bundles can be sold for a one-time fee, on a subscription plan, or on a payment plan. If you set up a course bundle and offer it on a subscription pricing plan, it essentially functions as an all-access membership.

Similarly, on Podia, product bundles can be sold for a one-time fee or on a payment plan, but if you want to offer access to your products on a subscription plan, you will need to set up a membership plan instead of a product bundle.

The most important difference in these two is that with Podia you can bundle simple digital downloads with courses, and with Teachable  you would have to actually do quite a few more steps to make that possible. Teachable would require you to create a separate, additional course, just to upload your downloadable file . Teachable does not have specific features for selling digital downloads. Yet another score for Podia!

Selling Digital Downloads

We just mentioned how selling digital downloads is a great way to bring in more sales. Giving away free digital downloads is a great way to get people on your list (whether you promote those digital downloads or your affiliates do). In addition, you may want to make “assets” available to your affiliates (like email swipes, etc.) and you can put those in Podia as digital downloads without setting up a course.

You can sell your content without the technical headaches, build a sales page,or set up a secure checkout form, delivering the content to your customer- Podia does it all!

With Podia, you can sell digital downloads of any kind, including eBooks, PDF’s, cheat sheets, checklists, video files, audio files and text.

Podia supports many different file types, including (but not limited to):

• MOV, MP4 and MP3
• PNG, JPG, GIF and PDF
• EPUB and MOBI
• .sketch, AI and PSD

Podia also has tons of other features that make selling digital downloads super easy and profitable, like built in email marketing, affiliate management, payment plans and upsells.

Affiliate Management

Setting up an affiliate program allows you to reward your affiliates when they refer new customers to you. So again, Podia is providing more ways for you to make money!

With this tool you can build your very own sales team with an affiliate marketing program. Your affiliates get a unique code to promote, and you can choose how much you want to pay them per sale. It’s a win- win for everyone involved. If you are interested in trying to get involved in an affiliate program you can click the link here to become an affiliate for Blog Biz School. You do have to be a customer to be an affiliate, but I have plenty of free products you can sign up for!

Teachable lets you reward others for sharing your course and track their results with the built-in affiliate marketing feature.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the absolute best tools you can have for any business. Podia provides you with the ability to create a drip email campaign outside of a specific product- a broadcast email to all your students, for example.

Podia email offers the ability to trigger multiple emails based on triggers and at specified intervals (i.e. number of days) after the triggering event. Triggering events include:

• Pre-Launch Sign-up
• Purchased
• Subscribed to (a membership)
• Signed up at (your storefront lead capture)

In Teachable, drip content is set up WITHIN a specific course or product bundle. This means you can send emails to specific groups which is very helpful, but might make it a little harder to send those more broadcast type emails. If you wanted to send a series to all your previous customers across the board, you would have to send those emails to another outside email provider and kick it off from there. Not a huge deal, but just another way Podia cuts down on the list of things you have to do.

Coupons on Podia vs Teachable

Everyone loves to feel like they are getting a deal, and that is why coupons/discounts are always a great way to drive sales.

Podia lets you create three types of coupons for your courses:

• Normal coupons: These behave like standard coupons. Your customers can use them for whatever “$ off” or “% off” discount you choose.
• Timed coupons: These expire on a set date, and can be useful for time-limited sales (for example, a Black Friday sale).
• Limited-Use coupons: These can only be used a pre-defined number of times, and are best for creating scarcity (e.g. “only 10 discounted spots available!”) or generating a coupon that you only want a single customer to use.

On Teachable, multiple-use coupons can be used by a specified number of users (e.g. limit of 1000) that have access to the coupon code. For example, if you create a multiple-use coupon with the code “HALFOFF” for 500 users, the first 500 users to use that code would receive 50% off their purchase.

So here, both programs give you coupon options which is great, but Podia just gives you more options on how to customize your coupons.

Getting Paid: Podia VS TEACHABLE

In order to collect payments from students and receive those payments, you will need to set up one or more payment processors.

On Podia, you can set up either PayPal or Stripe or both on any plan. All payments that are processed through Podia (after connecting to either PayPal or Stripe or both) will get deposited directly into your bank account within 2 business days.

On Teachable, students can pay with either credit card or PayPal. If you’re based in the US or Canada, then your school will process credit card payments using Teachable Payments. Credit card transactions on Teachable Payments are processed using Stripe Express. This allows school owners to receive their payouts daily, weekly, or monthly and also set their own payout schedules.

For both programs using PayPal, you have to either opt-in to BackOffice or have PayPal set up as a custom payment gateway. So for this portion the way you recieve money is fairly similar. The bigger difference is transaction fees for each program. SPOILER ALERT- Podia has no transaction fees!

Monthly Pricing and Transaction Fees

One of the main differences between Teachable and Podia is transactions fees. With Teachable, plans start at $29 per month, but with 5% transaction fees. Podia plans start at $39, but with no transaction fees. On the other hand, in order to get to no transaction fees on Teachable, you will need to upgrade to the Professional plan at $79 a month.

Podia plans start at $39 per month and you get 2 months free when billed annually – $390 / year – with zero transaction fees, unlimited everything and 24/7 support.

Upgrade to the Shaker plan to get:

• Embedded Checkout – embed buy buttons on any website, blog or landing page on the internet, and your visitors will be able to purchase your products without ever leaving the page.
• Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Third-Party Code – install third-party code snippets like Facebook Pixel, Sumo, Olark and more.
• FREE migration – need some help moving your content and audience to Podia? Good news: we’ve got you covered. Just tell us where your stuff is, and we’ll move it quickly and efficiently onto Podia (Teachable offers information on how to get a third party to help you migrate your course, but does not offer it themselves).

Teachable plans are billed annually with instant payouts if you set up Teachable payouts. On the monthly payment gateway, you will receive PayPal deposits once a month with up to a 30-day delay. 

If you’re on the Professional plan and up, you can connect your own custom payment gateways.

Teachable also includes:

• Quizzes (on Professional plan) – easily create a quiz with native features to reinforce learning, summarize essential information, and check in on your students’ progress.
• Course completion certificates (on Professional plan) – issue certificates of completion to reward your students and verify their success. Fully customize your own unique certificate for each course.
• Live chat support (on Professional plan) 

Podia UPDATES (September 2019)

Membership Post Metrics

• Performance metrics, including total views, total likes, total comments, top member and top post, give you better visibility into how well your membership posts are performing.

PODIA Updates (June 2019)

New Podia Membership Features 

• Public Posts – mark any post as public so that they can be seen just like a blog post. Grow your audience and attract new paying customers to your paid membership plans. Public posts will be indexed and searchable on all major search engines.
• Draft Posts – work on membership posts directly in Podia and save them as drafts to come back to later.
• Scheduled Posts – schedule membership posts to go out at any time in the future.
• Pinned Posts – set any post to be a pinned post, which means that it will always remain at the top of your posts. This would be a great way to make sure that they the first post that non-members see is a public post!

Categories in Podia

You can now categorize your online courses and digital downloads under the Settings tab when editing a product. And then once you’ve added one or more categories to a product, you can add the new category section to your storefront or to any of your sales pages. 

With categories, you have two design options You can choose to either display categories on your storefront or display individual products organized by category.

Verdict and Next Steps

Podia is the ultimate “more bang for your buck” product. Both Podia and Teachable offer desirable features for creating courses and have their own pros and cons, but ultimately, Podia has more to offer and surpasses the overall value in comparison to Teachable. 

I do encourage you to try them both out and see what you like best. 

Click here for a free trial of Podia.

Click here for a free trial of Teachable. 

Maybe you are still undecided and need to see just a little more. I’ve got you covered! Check out this side by side comparison.

Regardless of whether Podia or Teachable fit those needs, I would love to hear about your experience and your opinion on the one you choose. If you try something totally different and love it, we want to hear that too. Leave a comment below to let us know!